08.29.10
Unfair to Maimonides?
Professor Dawkins: Unfair to Maimonides ? By JAY G
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/507496-professor-dawkins-unfair-to-maimonides
Crews saw through Freud, but not Darwin
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100828/prettifying-darwin/
The American literary critic Frederick Crews once spoke of defenders of evolutionary theory who attempt to make Darwinism appear more congenial to the Christian faith than it truly is. These defenders, Crews wrote, present a vision of Darwin and Darwinism that “is often prettified to make it safe for doctrines that he himself was sadly compelled to leave behind.” The prettifying of evolution continues, even in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Crews was a penetrating critic of Freudian psychoanalysis, but the case of Darwin, and equally dubious case of bad science, seems to have escaped him.
Sea creatures and Gulf oil
Tiny Gulf Sea Creature Could Shed Light on Oil Spill’s Impact
ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2010) — A University of Alabama molecular biologist will soon bring dozens of tiny, transparent animals that live in Gulf Coast waters back to his campus laboratory as part of an effort to better understand the oil spill’s long-term impact on the coastal environment and creatures living there.
Liver cells from skin
Liver Cells Created from Patients’ Skin Cells
ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2010) — By creating diseased liver cells from a small sample of human skin, scientists have now shown that stem cells can be used to model a diverse range of inherited disorders. The University of Cambridge researchers’ findings, which will hopefully lead to new treatments for those suffering from liver diseases, were published August 25 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Secrets of the Gecko Foot
Secrets of the Gecko Foot Help Robot Climb
ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2010) — A Stanford mechanical engineer is using the biology of a gecko’s sticky foot to create a robot that climbs. In the same way the small reptile can scale a wall of slick glass, the Stickybot can climb smooth surfaces with feet modeled on the intricate design of gecko toes.
Hansen on activism
Am I an activist for caring about my grandchildren’s future? I guess I am
Concerted action to tackle climate change will happen only if the public demands it for the sake of future generations
Nine years later
Published on Saturday, August 28, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Nine Years Later, Afghanistan Looks Much the Same: A Mess
by Ted Rall
HERAT, AFGHANISTAN–OK. The roads are impressive. Specifically, the fact that they exist. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, more than two decades of civil conflict had left the country bereft of basic infrastructure. Roads, bridges and tunnels had been bombed and mined. What didn’t blow up got ground down by tanks. Maintenance? Don’t be funny.
It took them too long to get started, but U.S. occupation forces deserve credit for slapping down asphalt. Brutal, bone-crushing ordeals that used to take four days can be measured in smooth, endless-grey-ribboned hours. Bridges have been replaced. Tunnels have been shored up. Most major highways and major city streets have been paved.
But that’s about it.
90 Years After Suffrage
Published on Sunday, August 29, 2010 by In These Times
90 Years After Suffrage, Impoverished Mothers Need Another Kind of Equality
by Michelle Chen
Just in time for Women’s Equality Day, a new study has dampened the anniversary of women’s suffrage 90 years ago by highlighting the despair of women in poverty today.
Neo-Supremacy Chic
Published on Sunday, August 29, 2010 by FlaglerLive.com
Neo-Supremacy Chic: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s Tea-Scalding of MLK
by Pierre Tristam
They don’t call it white supremacy for nothing.
One of the ways this country’s reactionaries have made racism and neo-segregation chic is by co-opting the language of emancipation, equality and civil rights.
Fears about Big Oil and the Arctic
Published on Sunday, August 29, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
Deepwater Horizon Fears Resurface as Rigs Probe for Oil Under Arctic Ice
ExxonMobil and Shell compete to drill in wilderness despite Greenpeace’s fears a broken well could gush for years
by Robin McKie, Science editor
In a few days’ time, officials at the Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum in Greenland will reveal the winners of a new round of licences to drill for oil and gas in its waters. The announcement promises to be explosive.
The Next 500 Years
RG mail
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/26
CommonDreams.org
August 26, 2010 The Next 500 Years
by Robert C. Koehler
The participants in this unique dialogue may have been doing no less than
opening the window on the next 500 years.
US Strategy: Control the World by Controlling the Internet
A Chinese Perspective
RG mail
by Chen Baoguo
Global Times (August 23 2010)
Global Research (August 24 2010)
US controls threaten Internet freedom
In May 2009, Microsoft announced on its website that they would turn
off the Windows Live Messenger service for Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and
North Korea, in accordance with US legislation.
In January 2010, Google, the company which owns the largest Internet
information resources, declared that in order to establish a more open
Internet environment, they had to abandon the Chinese market.
What is even more worrying is that Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman
of US Homeland Security Committee, recently presented to the US Senate a
bill titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset”.
To control the world by controlling the Internet has been a dominant
strategy of the US.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BAO20100824&articleId=20758
Government abuse of GPS
RG mail
by Adam Cohen
time.com (August 25 2010)
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night,
put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere
you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do
not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and
no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your
movements.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html?artId=2013150?contType=article?chn=us#ixzz0xig4ImAv
08.28.10
Top secret America
Inside Top Secret America
A major investigation reveals the extent of America’s vast and heavily privatized military-corporate-intelligence establishment.
August 28, 2010 |
This is an important article, but the key issue is suppressed: this expansion of the intelligence community is still another obvious benefit from the 9/11.
The implications should demand that leftist skeptics explore this motive and opportunity to explore the conspiracy theory hypothesis.
First of fifty reasons why people disbelieve in god
50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God
I arrived at the website for this book, and found this blurb from Frans de Waals:
“Religion is as universal as language, which hints at a biological basis. Why did our ancestors evolve an attraction to the supernatural? The fundamental question is not whether this attraction is rational or not – which is the subject of a dozen recent provocative books — but what exactly faith delivers to those who possess it. The present book treats this question respectfully, listening to the answer of the believers themselves, which seems an excellent place to start.” — Frans de Waal, leading primatologist, author of Our Inner Ape (Riverhead, 2005)
We are being subjected endless evolutionary arguments based on Darwinian fallacies, and this blurb shows one of them. The first sentence is a fallacy. If you restrict mental input to purely Darwinian perceptions, it follows you have to use it to explain (away) religion. But in fact, the emergence of religion is highly complex, and a mystery, witness the Axial Age.
To say that our ancestors evolved an attraction to the supernatural is a species of mental muddle that leaves one flabbergasted. The emergence of homo sapiens produced a being who was sensitive to greater nature (the supernatural??), up to a point, and this occurred beyond the dynamic of natural selection.
This book’s title needs to be stood on its head: fifty reasons why people disbelieve in god. Darwinism has to at the top of the list.
Obama and religion
Barack Obama: Closeted Non-Believer?
Discussing the case of Abraham Lincoln is misleading. As we live in a period of the New Atheists, we need to be wary of the bad influence of this group, in the way it has spoiled atheism.
Lincoln had a very deep sense of the depth of the cosmic, way beyond the reductionist nonsense now current.
Midgley on limits of science
Metaphysics and the limits of science
Serious scientists know that they cannot explain all the major puzzles of existence
Mary Midgley
We have been saying this for a long time, but I worry that Midgeley, like Marilynne Robinson will compromise on Darwinism and spoil the basic critique we have made here.
As Karen Armstrong did with the Axial Age, a thorough mess…
Evopsych, Hauser and morality
When Evolutionary Psychology Collides With Morality
Casey Luskin
Hauser forgets that Kant was the first to divorce morality from religion. After that we should divorce it from Darwinian scientism.
In 2006, the New York Times published an exceedingly long book review titled “An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong,” covering Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser’s theories of the evolution of human morality. “Religions are not the source of moral codes,” stated the review when describing Hauser’s ideas, further noting that this claim, “if true, would have far-reaching consequences.” The review observed that “[m]atters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists,” but after Hauser’s work, “[m]oral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf.” So who has authority over morality: evolutionary psychologists, or theologians?
In his book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, Hauser explains that evolutionary psychologists have domain in this field. He argues that morality needs to be divorced from religion:
Bishop of Durham on Dawkins
Englightenment, and ‘shrill’ Dawkins (Bishop of Durham) By I.KANT
Added: Saturday, 28 August 2010 at 5:16 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/506905-englightenment-and-shrill-dawkins-bishop-of-durham
From the BBC:
The retiring Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, has called for a renewed focus on social mobility in the light of “the long failure of the enlightenment project”.
Speaking to James Naughtie, he said that in an “increasingly religious age” we needed to find new ways of dealing with the way “human beings mess things up”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8948000/8948907.stm
What are your thoughts?
New Evolution Theory: Biology Letters Publishes Concept Opposing Darwin
Adenovirus
Scientists Unveil Structure of Adenovirus, the Largest High-Resolution Complex Ever Found
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2010) — After more than a decade of research, Scripps Research Institute scientists have pieced together the structure of a human adenovirus — the largest complex ever determined at atomic resolution. The new findings about the virus, which causes respiratory, eye, and gastrointestinal infections, may lead to more effective gene therapy and to new anti-viral drugs.
Wheat genetics and global food shortage
Wheat’s Genetic Code Cracked: Draft Sequence Coverage of Genome to Aid Global Food Shortage
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2010) — A team of UK researchers, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), has publicly released the first sequence coverage of the wheat genome. The release is a step towards a fully annotated genome and makes a significant contribution to efforts to support global food security and to increase the competitiveness of UK farming.
Feeding the world
gnxp
The emerging conventional wisdom about world farming is gloomy. There is an alternative
http://www.economist.com/node/16889019
Pet project
gnxp
Stymied in the search for genes underlying human neuropsychiatric diseases, some researchers are looking to dogs instead. David Cyranoski meets the geneticist’s new best friend
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100825/full/4661036a.html
Wheat genome
gnxp
Scientists have cracked and published almost all of the highly complex genetic code of wheat — a staple food for more than a third of the world’s people — and say breeders can now use their findings to improve yields
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100827/sc_nm/us_wheat_genome
Plants send SOS
gnxp
Plants can summon insects to their aid to avoid being munched to death by caterpillars, scientists have found
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11101536
“I have a scheme”
Jon Stewart Pummels Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally: ‘I Have a Scheme’
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2063?akid=151.96588.7g4Bi5&t=16
Government and GPS
Ninth Circuit: The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves (without a Warrant)
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2061?akid=151.96588.7g4Bi5&t=12
Fracking
Is Fracking Even Worse Than Drilling?
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2058?akid=151.96588.7g4Bi5&t=6
Children and microwave radiation
http://www.thecanadiancharger.com/page.php?id=5&a=554
August 25, 2010 Protect your children from cell phone and WiFi radiation
before it’s too late
Barrie Trower, a physicist and former British Secret Service Microwave
Weapons Specialist, said he came out of retirement because microwave
technology that was used for weapons is now being used in schools.
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